Success makes some crimes honorable.

Speaking with sense we must fortify ourselves in the common sense of all, as a city is fortified by its law, and even more forcefully. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant.

The case of the conscience of Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, "How was it possible that all of you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?," replied that it was "not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in Heaven."

Nietzsche's problem is how to be a philosopher once he has grasped the finitude of philosophy.

It was in the reign of Charles II that they obtained the noble distinction of being exempted from giving their testimony on oath in a court of justice, and being believed on their bare affirmation. On this occasion the chancellor, who was a man of wit, spoke to them as follows: "Friends, Jupiter one day ordered that all the beasts of burden should repair to be shod. The asses represented that their laws would not allow them to submit to that operation. 'Very well,' said Jupiter; 'then you shall not be shod; but the first false step you make, you may depend upon being severely drubbed.'"

If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.

I am against a League war in present circumstances, because the anti-League powers are strong. The analogy is not King v. Barons, but the War of the Roses. If the League were strong enough I should favour sanctions, because the effect would suffice, or the war would be short and small. The whole question is quantitative.

Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

Quite a heavy weight, a name too quickly famous.

The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments of this drilling. I am persuaded that nothing, in modern education, tends so much, when properly used, to form exact thinkers, who attach a precise meaning to words and propositions, and are not imposed on by vague, loose, or ambiguous terms. The boasted influence of mathematical studies is nothing to it; for in mathematical processes, none of the real difficulties of correct ratiocination occur.

One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.

Generals are usually a conservative force who can be relied on to oppose social change.

So long as a man's power, that is, his capacity to realize what he has in mind, is bound to the goal, to the work, to the calling, it is, considered in itself, neither good nor evil, it is only a suitable or unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of it as a possession, that is, thinks of power in itself, then his power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil; it is power withdrawn from responsibility, power which betrays the spirit, power in itself.

Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and broad as much as possible by differential duties.

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.

The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.

"The physical world is real." That is supposed to be the fundamental hypothesis. What does "hypothesis" mean here? For me, a hypothesis is a statement, whose truth must be assumed for the moment, but whose meaning must be raised above all ambiguity. The above statement appears to me, however, to be, in itself, meaningless, as if one said: "The physical world is cock-a-doodle-do." It appears to me that the "real" is an intrinsically empty, meaningless category (pigeon hole), whose monstrous importance lies only in the fact that I can do certain things in it and not certain others.

Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.

Waste not the remnant of thy life in those imaginations touching other folk, whereby thou contributest not to the common weal.

Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia.

Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.

The negative utilitarian might reply that this formulation of the problem is misleading. We do not live in a notional world where only a pinprick, minor pains, or even just "mild" suffering exists. In the real world, frightful horrors as well as humdrum malaise occur every day. The intensity of suffering is sometimes so dreadful that its victims are prepared to destroy themselves to bring their torment to an end. Each year, some 800,000 people across the planet kill themselves while in the grip of suicidal despair. Tens of millions of people are severely depressed or suffer chronic neuropathic pain. By way of contrast, the genteel conventions of an ethics seminar in academic philosophy, or the scholarly technicalities of a journal article, simply fail to come to terms with the enormity of what's at stake. To talk of a "pinprick" is to trivialise the NU ethical stance.

The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word - like a lump of sugar in water.

The idea of universal human dignity ultimately comes out of Christianity... the view that all human beings are equal in the sight of God because they have the capacity for moral choice. As Western thought developed in the 17th-18th centuries, this took on a secular form under thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Immanuel Kant or Georg Hegel, who argued that human equality is... based on human autonomy.

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest-the one who crosses the finish line last.

Second, by this and other means we are driven to perceive, what is quite evident in itself, that instantaneous feelings flow together in a continuum of feeling, which has in a modified degree the peculiar vivacity of feeling and has gained generality. And in reference to such general ideas, or continua of feeling, the difficulties about resemblance and suggestion and reference to the external, cease to have any force.

In the Church which was founded at Corinth, St. Paul had special difficulties of the kind I have mentioned. In that flourishing commercial city, which through its shipping and situation, maintained a vital connexion between East and West, numerous crowds of people flocked together from all quarters, different in speech and in culture. As they mingled with the inhabitants, they produced, by contacts and contrasts, new and ever new differences. Even in the Church this differentiation endeavoured to make itself felt in sects and parties; and a kind of pagan wisdom made a special attempt to force itself forward as a teacher of truth. In his first letter to this church, from which the text I read is taken, St. Paul strongly combats this tendency.

Humans already massively intervene in Nature, whether through habitat destruction, captive breeding programs for big cats, "rewilding", etc. So the question is not whether humans should "interfere", but rather what ethical principles should govern our interventions.

Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.

A man has a right to use a saw, an axe, a plane, separately; may he not combine their uses on the same piece of wood? He has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject? Such a law, instead of enlarging our conveniences, as was intended, would most fearfully abridge them, and crowd us by monopolies out of the use of the things we have.

Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being - at my expense.

This world belongs to the energetic.

Unbelievably, there is still here [in Los Angeles] one of my most favorite places-the home of Henry and Ruth Denison at the very top of the hill, at the end of a road going nowhere, hanging above a reservoir-lake surrounded with pines. They have a sundeck under a eucalyptus tree where I have slept some memorably deep sleeps, and awakened very early in the morning, before sunrise, with stars still showing through the branches. In this house I have made some of my greatest friendships, so much so that I cannot think of it without that curious pleasure-pain which the Japanese call aware-the sense of echoes in the courtyards of the mind after the sun has left and the people have gone their ways forever.

In the history of madness, two events signal this change with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad in chains at Bicêtre. Between these two singular and symmetrical events, something happened, whose ambiguity has perplexed historians of medicine: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some, and, according to others, the progressive discovery, by science and philanthropy, of madness in its positive truth. In fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure was taking shape, which did not undo that ambiguity but was decisive for it. This structure explains the passage from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to the experience that is our own, which confines madness in mental illness.

On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle, This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist.

And because the condition of Man, (as hath been declared in the precedent Chapter) is a condition of Warre of every one against everyone; in which case every one is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body.

Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology. p. 70.

Perfect is the virtue which is according to the Mean! Rare have they long been among the people, who could practice it!

Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.

Are ye also yet without understanding? Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.

To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

These examples... show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart still more widely from the Gorilla and that, consequently, such differences of proportion can have no ordinal value.

I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".

I am not a visual person. I have spent so many bounded years in my childhood that I have grown used to having books as my window on reality.